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Idea Jail keeps the mind stuck in a death rut
(Disclaimer: It’s a good point here to say that if you haven’t seen Avatar and plan to, you may want to bypass this post until after you’ve seen it.)
Despite what this may seem like, this is not specifically criticism of blockbuster films like Avatar. They’re fine. Rather, as someone who has studied the media for decades, I am acutely aware that much of what I’d like to see in movies hasn’t made it to the big screen. I would love to see movies step out of Idea Jail and break new ground by overcoming stereotypes.
I recently wrote about the nature of conflict in drama, that creating dramas is usually about creating artificial conflicts for characters to deal with. I questioned the long-term impact of a movie-goes, TV-watcher, and book reader mentally digesting the subliminal messages that life is constant conflict.
Let’s talk about this from a law of attraction perspective. If our media does not give us positive, exciting visions, it does not help us create positive, exciting futures. It has been my long-held view that a great service the arts could perform is to provide positive visions that can inspire people. As it is, the formula is to sometimes show happy-ending triumph, but along the way characters are often beaten up something fierce. Avatar is a great example.
Many miracles don't make the news
This is going back to the basics. When you choose to watch the news, do you have any idea what you are implicitly agreeing to watch?
Essentially you are agreeing to watch what a small group of people have decided is in your public interest to watch. They decide what the news is.
Supposedly, the news we watch and read is about real life. It’s puffed up to be the truth, just the facts. We’re supposed to be more informed as a result of our exposure to it. But if you stop to look at what material you’re habitually ingesting in our news reports, how much of it works as important information to know?
It’s often suggested that not watching the news makes one a current affairs dunce. Other thinkers, especially like Wayne Dyer, suggest that passing on the nightly news improves a person’s mental health.
Mental Poison Dispenser
As an aspiring novelist. I read my fair share of books on how to amaze readers with my prose. Time and again the writing instructors say that if you want to write a best-seller, you’ve got to fill your novel with page after page of conflict.
Translation: if you ever hope to rise above the poverty line as a selling novelist, the industry demands that you make your protagonists squirm. Make ‘em suffer. Make ‘em miserable.
The flip side of that writing advice that I seldom see talked about is the psychological impact all that manufactured conflict has on readers. The same, of course, can be said for movie-goers and TV viewers because screenwriters work with the same advice to sell their screenplays.
Translation: the media that you ingest as an entertainment consumer has been created and produced to give you the vicarious thrill of watching someone suffer conflict. It is a formula built into the system.
TV sucks
I enjoyed watching This Emotional Life on PBS. It was a six-hour documentary on human emotions shown over three days.
In the second episode there was a scene where a young woman was being treated for severe depression. She was being given an evolved variation of the shock treatment that was made such a vision of evil in movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. According to the documentary the technique has progressed greatly and it has been scientifically shown that this therapy actually stimulates the re-growth of brain cells in the part of the brain where depression has reduced brain cells.
But the thing that got to me was that when the young patient came home from the hospital after her therapy treatments, she would park herself in front of the TV and zone out.
Let’s make sure you got that. In front of the TV!
I was startled to see that and wondered why the medical community didn’t have some alternatives for people undergoing treatment for depression.
